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Cream Oxcel
One teaspoonful oxcel, 2 ounces cream, hot water to fill mug. Season with salt and pepper, and celery salt.
A hot savory drink from the winter side of the soda fountain, where beef tea stood in for coffee. The whole thing rests on one proprietary product that no longer exists on the shelf.
- What oxcel wasAlmost certainly a proprietary fountain preparation based on concentrated beef extract; the name points to ox plus celery, though the recipe adds celery salt separately. The nearest modern stand-in is a teaspoon of beef bouillon paste or a strong beef base; add celery salt to bridge the gap.
- Two ounces of creamA quarter cup. Market cream of the period was generally thinner than today's heavy cream, closer to what we would call light cream. Heavy cream will make the drink noticeably thick and fatty in a mug this size.
- Hot water, not boilingCream dropped into boiling salted broth can curdle at the edges; water at about 180F keeps the drink smooth.
- Mug sizeThe recipe does not state one; a mug of six to ten ounces is the likely range. Subtracting the two ounces of cream leaves roughly four to eight ounces of water.
- Season last and lightlyBeef base and celery salt are both heavily salted. Build the drink, taste, then add salt only if it needs it; pepper is better fresh-ground and floated on top.
- YieldOne mug, one serving. It does not hold well and separates on standing, so build it to order.
The American soda fountain of the 1890s and 1900s had a cold-weather problem: iced drinks do not sell in January. The trade's answer was a line of hot beverages served in china mugs from the same marble counter, and among the most popular were hot beef teas built on commercial meat extracts, the descendants of Liebig's extract of meat and its many imitators. These drinks carried a whiff of the sickroom about them, since beef tea was standard invalid fare, but they were sold as bracing and restorative to healthy customers too. "Oxcel" is one of the many proprietary fountain preparations whose names are now the only trace of them; the word is sometimes read as a compound of ox and celery, celery flavoring being fashionable at the time in tonics and soft drinks alike. The salt, pepper and celery salt finishing this one put it squarely in the same family as the bouillon cup a hotel would serve, only made with a soda-jerk's speed.